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A broken sigh. “I cannot.”

“Heal her,” Dawsyn says again, only this time, the words tremble. She blinks and blinks until the spinning subsides enough to make out the parts of the mage, the parts that saw her through hundreds of years only to bring her here, to the bottom of the Chasm.

“She knew her limitations,” Dawsyn murmurs. “She… she…”

Salem’s voice now, gentle in her ear, wet with sorrow. A heavy hand rests on her shoulder. “She couldn’ leave yeh there, lass.”

Ryon leans forward slowly, as though it takes all his strength. He whispers something into the mage’s ear, his throat straining with unspent emotion. Ryon, who knew far more of Baltisse than Dawsyn ever will.

Because the mage is dead.

Yennes shuts her lids.

Salem folds her hands.

Ryon kisses her forehead.

The mage is dead.

An immeasurable time passes. A time where Dawsyn cannot assemble fragments of thought. She does not dare to see what other carnage might be waiting in this pit. Instead, she swallows each sob that stubbornly attempts to breach. She lets the image of Baltisse’s broken eyes blister the inside of her mind. She waits impatiently for that reliable thing within her to usurp the pain, the anger to quell the sorrow. Stifle it.

She begs for it, pleads for the shock to be swallowed within her and be replaced with something hard and bitter.

It is Ryon’s swaying form that brings Dawsyn back. As though her ears were unclogged, her brain unstuffed, she can suddenly hear something other than an inward screaming.

Ryon kneels before Baltisse’s body, but his stare wanes. His eyes hooded, head bobbing with delirium, he pitches forward.

“Ryon?”

The knife in his back,Dawsyn thinks. She sees it now, where it lay bloody and discarded beside him.

Ryon groans.

“Yennes!” Dawsyn calls, her voice one of a thousand shards of ice, scratching her lungs as they pass. Her ribs are likely broken. “Yennes?”

“I’m here,” she says suddenly, appearing from the loud, echoing darkness with a torch.

“Ryon,” Dawsyn tells her, trying to stand. Trying to go to him. “His back.”

She watches the woman hover over Ryon’s slumped form. Watches the white light glow from her hands as she presses them to his back. The light is feeble. It does not last. Yennes’s magic is expended, just like Dawsyn’s, just like…

“The wound is… sealed,” Yennes says, panting. “That’s the best I can do for now.”

“Thank you,” Ryon mutters, sighing in relief. He falls back gingerly, wincing.

Yennes averts her eyes, begins to move away. “There are many others with infection, lung sickness,” she says. “I will need to do what I can for them as well, before they can travel… if the iskra allows me to.”

Dawsyn can hear them – the many, many others. Crying, arguing, bustling in the dark. She gestures for Yennes to pass her torch.

Dawsyn lifts the flame high, casts its glow further.

The Chasm is filled.

The Ledge people are all around. Masses of them. Stepping over one another to find space on the ground or milling through the crowd like rats. Along the middle, that thin vein of shallow water creeps through, travelling a path they will not follow. They are trapped in darkness. Fearful. Uncertain.

But free.

“We did it,” Dawsyn says to no one, to herself.

Ryon comes to stand beside her, his steps slow and stiff. She takes his hand, intensely relieved to feel it in hers. A remnant of something good.

“Youdid it,” the hybrid says.

They say little else. They simply stand amongst the ancestors of the Fallen Village, once again returned to ground, and contemplate the days ahead. The unknown path that must be travelled. The path that leads to somewhere or nowhere.

Two paths,a voice reminds her.

Both are filled.